


the horrific giving tree, featuring pietro maximoff's poor judgement

by orphan_account



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Protective Siblings, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 15:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>this is what happens when you read the Toast's "children's stories made horrific" and then have a lot of feelings about your favorite nerd getting beat up<br/>featuring weird eldritch magic, suffocation tw</p>
            </blockquote>





	the horrific giving tree, featuring pietro maximoff's poor judgement

The boy had been lost in the forest for a very long time when he met the tree. He could run very fast, but he kept going in circles.  
Boy, the tree said. Rest under my shade and eat my apples.  
He ate the apples.  
(They looked like apples.)  
They were a bit dry and mealy, and they stained his mouth and hands, but he couldn't stop eating them. He felt strange.   
Then he heard the tree speak to him again.   
"Boy, come climb up my trunk. Take my branches and build a house."  
"I have a house in the city. I live there with my sister."  
"How nice. What is her name?"  
"…I don't remember."  
He stayed with the tree for a very long time.  
He ate nothing but apples, and he was always happy. The sky seemed to be inside a soap bubble, twirling and shining as if it was on MTV, and he fell down a lot; he went from runner-trim to skeletal as his body burnt itself up to survive.  
His stomach hurt at night and he had trouble sleeping, and he threw up often, but the tree was so patient with him, would always give him more apples to eat. He was so happy.  
But one day he realized that had never been outside the forest.  
"Might I see the world?" he asked the tree.   
"Of course! Cut down my trunk and build a boat to see the world."

His body wouldn't always work right. He felt dizzy and the tips of his fingers were so cold that the blood wouldn't move into them. But he could feel the ocean against his skin, the fresh sea air against his face. (- or at least he thought he was feeling it-) There were always apples to eat, and the dark wriggling pips in them were like the moving spots behind his eyes. They were cold dry apples without much of a crunch, but the tree was so generous and so kind.   
He would never have made so much progress without the boat, not when his hands shook so and his ankles ached with every step and all his joints felt stretched too tight and his nose ran sluggish dark blood down his chin because there was something touching him inside his lungs. The tree was always generous to him. So good to him, even though he was so useless and so bad.  
But one morning the sunrise was red at the horizon. Red, he thought, and for a moment his body felt a little less weak. Muscle memory. That was when he realized that there wasn't any sea, and there wasn't any boat- and then his mind slipped back into itself just enough for him to feel fear.  
"How long have I been here?" he accused the tree. "Are there people looking for me? I need to go home."  
"You could not make it out of the forest. I can feel you. I can find you. My roots stretch far."  
She crooked a root and the thing in the boy's lungs twitched. He fell down to his bony knees. His hands flew to his chest and a sound escaped from his throat, as if he was trying to speak but couldn't manage it.  
And the thing in his lungs began to tap-tap-tap on the inside of his ribcage. Why couldn't his body fend it off? Why could he feel it crawling under his skin, as if it was part of his own flesh?  
Blood poured freely from his nose, trickled from his chest where the tree roots sought to push forth as if through concrete. The tree was real in a way he had never been real. Soon it would all be done and he could rest.

Everything was quiet. Peaceful. God, it grated on Wanda's nerves!  
Pietro often went away by himself, but it was unusual for him to slip away in the night without telling anyone of his destination. And when she found a pair of unused circus tickets in his room, her keenly honed witchy intuition knew something was wrong. She clipped her nails, pricked her finger, put it in an envelope, and began casting a spell- a real spell, not just the manipulation of chaos energies that her mutant power allowed in the heat of battle.  
"Blood of my blood, our shared blood -tell me where my brother is." It went on in an archaic vein for several minutes in multiple languages. At last she opened her eyes and sank into an overstuffed armchair. She tore the envelope open with her teeth.  
Apple seeds?  
She got her white-handled knife and crushed a seed with the flat of it. When she lifted the white-handled knife, it was not a seed, but a newly-dead maggot, all bloody and squished.  
Well. Her brother was in trouble again.

He was waiting it to be over, but then a woman stepped into the clearing.   
She looked like the sunset. She was dressed like the sunset, in firey red and blazing gold.  
He'd liked the sunset, in the forest. It meant that he could lay his head down on the fallen leaves and sleep and nothing would hurt.  
He liked the sunset woman, too. Was like the right word for this sudden heaviness, as if his feet were once again on solid ground? He couldn't tell.  
She streamed across the clearing and stood close to him. She was so warm. "Pietro, it's me, Wanda- we're going home."  
The tree reached out to her mind, roots bleeding into the earth. "Hello, little girl. What's your name? Come try my apples."  
No, Pietro thought desperately. He only knew he would have killed himself to keep her safe. Not her too, leave her be, please-  
When he put a name to the feeling of protectiveness that tugged at his chest almost as badly as the pain, the name was sister, and it hurt.  
As she approached the tree, Pietro could feel her doing something strange with things he couldn't see.  
(It was actually a very complicated bit of energy manipulation involving the proper names of fragments of reality and space-time interactions and the concept of rightness as a living entity, but Pietro just felt it as the hairs on his neck standing up and his heart pounding in his ears and his shallow breaths abruptly loud.)  
The woman's eyes flashed red. Not blood-red, but the strange burning red at the heart of a star. Her mind slammed shut around the tree, as hard and finite as the bang of a drum. Then she put a hand on the bark and spoke very softly, and all of a sudden there had never been a tree at all.

The tree growing in his lungs was still there, though. The roots digging into the so-tender flesh, the needle branches prickling and stabbing him with every breath. Only it wasn't just growing in his lungs- it was his lungs. A series of coughs spattered blood into his hands.  
"Pietro. Look at me." She pulled him in close, then frowned. "I see. It's like one of those wasps that lays its eggs-"  
He tried to speak, but he couldn't. The tree was part of him- he had to protect the tree until it wanted to come out of his body. He was a support system for the tree, and could no more speak against it than kill his own child. I'm sorry, he tried to say with his eyes. You can't save me. The trees are all one tree- it'll know what you did, Wanda, just run-  
"Don't speak. It'll rip your vocal cords out first. And it can't defeat me, either."  
He tilted his head a little, evidencing Why Not, although his eyes remained a beseeching request for her to flee.  
"Because I want you more than it does, and I'm smarter than it's ever been. Now let me think."  
She pushed him onto his back and rested her fingertips against his throat. He knew she was just as scared as he was, only fighting it better, so he stayed still.   
The baby tree had hijacked his nervous system and was using his own metabolism against him, winding itself through sinew and nerves, and generally aping a right to exist.  
"It's feeding off your energy. If I'm going to take it out, I need you… I think I need to trick your heart into stopping so I can trick the tree into thinking you're dead."  
The tree was woven so tightly around him. It wouldn't let go. He managed to gasp out a few words in Russian. "Without it I'll be nothing, it's replaced my lungs, I won't be able to breathe. If I kill it after all it's done for me-"   
"It's letting you breathe. What happens when it changes it's mind? Pietro, you are plain old running out of time. The thing inside you is about to hatch. Brother, I'll breathe for both of us, just trust me, please." And then, switching first into Romani, then into Yiddish, "I promise you I'll keep you safe. You deserve to be safe."  
That was the code they'd used when on the run, rapidly switching between the two languages of their upbringing, an unspoken promise that whatever they were saying was for real.  
He closed his eyes; she stopped his heart.  
Where her hands passed he could hear the tree screaming, feel it shriveling, prickling and itching all through his organs. It burned. But in a way it was a good burning, like antibiotic cream on an infected wound, like ripping off a scab.  
"Sorry if this hurts," she murmured.   
He tried to speak to tell her that he could handle it, but he couldn't make words. I'm not breathing, he realized, and that made him gag and choke with air he didn't have.  
"I'm almost done, Pietro. Grab my hand."  
He seized her wrist with both hands and clung like he was drowning, and then she touched him again and there wasn't any more pain.  
At last air rushed into his lungs and it felt amazing. Was that how breathing felt without a tree in the way?  
"How do you feel?"  
He tried to stand up; instead, he managed to sit up, then fell against her like a sackful of bricks, muttered "Tired" into her shoulder.  
Bony and cold, she thought, but hers, hers, hers. "I know. We're going to go home."  
He made no attempt to move, instead entirely, lazily content to luxuriate in the warmth of her, he was as liquid as a cat.  
Wanda sighed and shook her head. "I mean it, lazybones. Get on your feet."  
"You don't mean it," he murmured into her shoulder, wanting to drown out the knowledge of how close he'd come to absolute powerlessness with knowledge of her presence.  
"That's up for debate." She made no attempt to move either; instead, she pulled him closer and stroked the leaves from his blood-stained hair.


End file.
